it's time to get above ourselves

James Connolly Day

James Connolly was born in Edinburgh on 5 June 1868 and died at the hands of a firing squad on 12 May 1916, 100 years ago. It’s important to remember him as part of our own history but also as a warning to those who advocate that we shelve any political ideals until after independence.

“If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.”
– James Connolly, executed by the British state: Edinburgh & Scots radical, socialist, republican.

That’s what Bella Caledonia is all about.

But we need your support to move forward…

4 Comments

catriona
2 years ago

And he’s still right today! That’s why it’s so important we take decisions now on issues like our currency, land ownership – why should we allow our land to be sold to the highest bidder? surely some form of compulsary purchase can be devised?

Ian Kirkwood
2 years ago

Gordon McShean
2 years ago

My good friend, the late Robert Curran, SNP National Secretary in the 1950s, used to express the opinion (to those close to him) that the party (and Scots in general) might well acknowledge their belief in the need to maintain a “nice” identity to nurture the idea that the “best” Scottish independence would some day be granted to us by “reasonable” English people. But his secret support of our raid on the Army Cadet’s hall in Johnstone – at a time when the Queen was being inaugurated – reflected contradictory sentiment (an attitude which apparently remains). He insisted that the guns we took should be destroyed, rather than held to empower subsequent initiatives. When he subsequently returned to Scotland from exile in the US it was evident he’d accepted the inevitability that this “niceness” would bind us all – even as independence was being celebrated in the most unlikely spots around the world: we should quietly watch our nation sink into a nice, romantic dependency upon the English. I doubt if he’d have believed then I’d have to remain in exile for so many years (ignored even by SNP activists), or have entertained the idea that I might subsequently have the title RETIRED TERRORIST. It just isn’t “nice” enough.